


Washing-up, Ward B

by Naraht



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Coming Out, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Missing Scene, Queer Character, Unrequited Love, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 10:46:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nurse Adrian compares notes with Andrew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Washing-up, Ward B

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greerwatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/gifts).



> This is set between Andrew's first letter to Laurie and his encounter with Bunny.
> 
> Thank you to Makioka for her encouragement and advice, and to Selena for [the discussion](http://naraht.dreamwidth.org/523797.html?thread=5408789#cmt5408789) that started me thinking about this scenario.

Andrew was at his usual place in the kitchen that night, the night after Laurie had gone. It seemed strange to Nurse Adrian not to hear them talking together as she passed the door. How many times she had paused there on her way to the nurses' quarters, hearing with a touch of envy the murmur of those quiet, confidential voices within.

Tonight she pushed open the door and went into the kitchen. Andrew startled at the sound and turned to see who it was. For a moment his flushed face was full of unguarded affection and longing, and its strength of feeling took her aback. Once upon a time she had thought of Andrew as even-tempered.

"I'm sorry," he said, looking suddenly down at the teacups in the sink. "I thought you were--I was thinking of something else--"

"Please tell me if you'd rather be alone," she said. "I thought you might like the company, but if..."

"I was only standing here feeling sorry for myself," said Andrew ruefully.

He raised his grey eyes to her for a moment and then looked away again.

"I can't believe that he's gone," she said.

It was only with Andrew that she could allude so easily to Laurie, trusting that he would respond with sympathetic feeling. Why this should be so, she did not understand, but it had been the case ever since that dance in the orderlies' quarters.

"It was silly to have gone to Bridstow," Andrew said. Soapy water sloshed up over the counter as he rinsed out the teapot with some vehemence. "After John and Dave went to all that trouble to give me the evening off, I hardly even said goodbye. I can't think why. I just left him there. And now who knows when I shall get another day."

"Will you go and see him?"

"Of course. As soon as I can."

One could visit Bridstow easily in an afternoon. Men went on passes all the time; she had gone herself, once or twice, in search of small luxuries that one could not get at the hospital. And yet she had never even thought to ask Laurie if she could visit him in town. Really she had not known him well enough. Hardly well enough, one would have thought, to justify falling in love.

She handed Andrew a fresh teatowel, and he wiped his hands on it.

"I hadn't the courage to see him off," she said timidly. "You must have noticed."

Andrew looked at her in surprise. Clearly he hadn't. "You? Why?"

She felt a blush come to her face at that, stifling in the steam of the close ward kitchen. "Oh, it's all too ridiculous. You would laugh at me..."

"I wouldn't," he said earnestly, and because it was Andrew she believed him. "Look, I'll make you a fresh pot of tea. I'd already tipped out the old stuff, because it was just me."

She wondered what he and Laurie had talked about, all those evenings together in the kitchen after lights out. How many cups of tea had they drunk together? Laurie would never ask her to come and visit him in Bridstow. She didn't think he would even write.

"I went for a walk and met him in the lane," she began, twisting in her hands the hospital handkerchief that he had lent her that day. "I told him how much I would miss him when he went, or perhaps I didn't, but... I--I couldn't help it. I--"

Overcome by the remembrance of that shame as much as by grief, she began to cry again, so there was no need to relate exactly what it was she had been unable to help.

"Oh," said Andrew, a dawning of quiet sympathy. "Oh, yes."

"And after all he'd never given me the slightest bit of encouragement. I should have guessed. I'd never even thought that he might... be in love with someone else."

The last words came out all in a rush, followed by a gulp of tears. Then she had to blow her nose with the handkerchief, which, as Laurie had said, had a hole in it and was none too clean. It was only when she recovered herself again that she noticed Andrew was staring at her, heavy teakettle in hand.

"He said that?"

"He... he said she didn't know, she couldn't know, he could never tell her... And I oughtn't to have said anything at all to you, if he knew that I had..."

"She couldn't know," repeated Andrew dumbly. He was still holding the iron kettle, which took two hands for her to lift comfortably. He seemed almost unconscious of its weight.

"Did he never say anything about her…?"

It seemed odd, inconceivable, that during all those evenings in the kitchen Laurie had never mentioned his hopeless romance. She wanted to be angry with Andrew for never giving her an inkling but he seemed as baffled as she.

"Sometimes I think," said Andrew, "that we never discussed what was really important."

He put the kettle down, now, without lighting the gas on the hob. He touched her arm as though he felt he ought to comfort her but was not sure how. His hand was still wet from the dishes; she could feel the heat of it through the cotton of her uniform.

It was too awful. Not because of Andrew, whose awkward kindness only ever seemed brotherly, but because it reminded her horribly of what had happened that afternoon in the lane. She began to cry all over again from sheer embarrassment, thinking at the back of her mind that perhaps never seeing Laurie again was for the best.

"And now you must think I'm silly too…"

"Of course not," said Andrew staunchly.

She had a good cry then, into Andrew's handkerchief, which was cleaner and had fewer unhappy associations clinging to it. All the unhappy associations were purely her own.

"He was so good," she said finally, sniffling. "But it only made it worse. He didn't... he didn't take advantage..."

Before sending her off to the hospital, her mother had warned her with faint, allusive unease against men--particularly enlisted men--taking advantage. And yet, dim and unformed at the back of her mind, there was a faint regret that Laurie had not felt himself more tempted. His forbearance seemed, in a certain light, the sort of indignity which only a marriage proposal could have redeemed.

"Laurie wouldn't," said Andrew.

"He only kissed me because he felt sorry for me. Silly little VAD, only nineteen, never even..." She gulped. "I wish he hadn't, it didn't make me feel a bit better. Only that he pitied me, do you see?"

"I do see," he said slowly.

She knew he was too honest to assure her that it wasn't true.

"And all the while he's in love with someone else," she continued. "If he weren't away from her, here in hospital, he'd never look twice at me."

Andrew turned suddenly away. For a horrible moment she wondered whether she had told too much. She had not breathed a word about the kiss to anyone, not to any of the nurses, not a line in any of her letters. Andrew was a friend, but he was also a man. 

"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have--and he's your friend."

"It's always better to know the truth," he said, his back still turned.

He had begun now to dry the hundreds of spoons and knives piled on a tea towel by the sink. Of course the cutlery drawer was halfway across the kitchen. She automatically accepted the first handful from him and went to put them away, grateful for the prompting of these small routines. They worked together in silence, reaching for the normal things that were within their grasp.

Far away one could hear a distant air raid siren and the crump of guns. She went about the task in a trance, heaping handfuls of faintly warm knives into the splintered wooden drawer, telling herself how little any of it really mattered. Men were dying overhead. In Bridstowe, in London. In the ward next door, come to that, men who had known her and spoken her name.

"Do you ever feel," she asked finally, grasping at the guilt as a sort of conversational lifeline, "that the war is so very vast, and so terrible, that caring about anything else is unforgivably selfish? Little things I mean, like how the soup tonight was all potatoes, or that no one has fixed the paving stone outside. When I think of Bill in a camp in Germany… and here I am crying because Laurie has been moved down the road. I know that he's safe and comfortable, how can I still be unhappy?" 

"One can't help how one feels," said Andrew. "At least I can't."

She could sense the unevenness in his voice. There was something queer in it, a desolate note that she had never heard before.

He was scrubbing at the countertop with a dirty rag that was doing nothing in the way of cleaning, spreading the spilled remains of the evening's vegetable soup into cloudy spirals on the stainless steel. One could see the blanching of the knuckles in his work-reddened hands. It was just the way that Bill got when he didn't want to face something, that fruitless desire for action.

She felt a strange surge of jealousy, remembering one autumn afternoon when she had stood in the kitchen at home listening to Bill telling her that he had proposed to Vera. She had been slicing onions--how odd, that one remembered it like that--and stopped to wipe the hair from her eyes. She remembered laughing and crying at once, embracing Bill and wondering when he would tell mother. One couldn't help how one felt, of course not, but how had one's feelings got to be so complicated?

"What is it?" she said. And then, more quietly: "You love him too."

There was a long silence.

"I haven't wanted to call it that."

The revelation had come at just the wrong time. There was nothing left to wash, nothing left to clean. Andrew's heavy boots squeaked on the floor as he turned away from the empty sink, drying his hands again on the teatowel. She could feel her face going scarlet with the helpless consciousness of what she had just done. She longed to flee; she didn't.

"Andrew, I--"

"Please don't," he said finally, giving her an imploring look. "It's not his fault, it's no one's but mine. I haven't--I haven't been able to think straight, since..."

"Since he came," she finished, speaking for herself as much as him.

"Yes." 

Andrew looked at her with an expression of grateful common feeling, as if she had said just the right thing. She was not at all sure that she had. Her mind was still whirling.

"But I don't understand," she said.

"Neither do I," said Andrew. "But it hardly seems to matter."

She took a deep breath. 

"You can tell me about it, you know."


End file.
